The Fair itself was a veritable town of booths or stalls within a wooden palisade, each quarter or ‘street’ within it taking its name from the merchandise displayed or the nationality of the traders who occupied it. Then there were the Spicery—the general grocery, or trade in sugar, spices, and preserved fruits, in which the monks of St. Swithun traded largely—the Pottery—the Stannary (or Falconry)—the ‘stret’ of the Flemings, of the Genoese, of the Cornishmen; and the prices paid were high, for a high ‘tariff wall’ surrounded the Fair. On a burden borne by one man was levied a penny, on a cask of wine or cyder fourpence, for a falcon twopence, for an ape or bear—animals much affected as butts and playthings by the great, and even by the monks—fourpence. Multiplying these by twelve, as is customarily done, to reduce them to modern values, we realise how heavy these tolls were. Nor were luxuries and alcoholic drinks the only article taxed. The raw material paid toll too: every bale of wool fourpence, of which twopence went to the Bishop, and twopence, to conciliate popular support evidently, to the check weighman. Plantagenet times were not a Cobdenite millennium; and, probably, could a ballot have been taken at the time, while the monks and the Bishop’s ‘menie’ would undoubtedly have voted for Tariff
Reform, very few Winchester citizens—though the Fair was profitable enough to them in reality—would have polled with them.
Within the Fair itself, the mise en scène and the humours of the crowd would have presented a subject fully worthy of Ben Jonson himself, and it is safe to say that no human concourse, not even Bartholomew Fair in its most palmy days, could have taxed his genius more than St. Giles’s Fair during the Edwardian régime would have done. Motley, indeed, was the crowd gathered here—Jews and Normans, Poles and Italians, strolling minstrels, quacks and jugglers, ballad-mongers and fortune-tellers, thieves and swaggerers, Corporal Nyms and Ancient Pistols, rogues and sharpers of every kind, cheating, swearing, dancing, quarrelling, drinking,—hawk-eyed chapmen and hard-visaged countrymen, each alike bent on cheapening the other’s demands, huckstering, gesticulating, and chaffering in strange dialects and all but unknown tongues—while here and there vigilant assizemen, wearing the Bishop’s livery, passed eager-eyed amidst them, keenly scenting out deficient weight or cozening ell-wand, for in spite of severe penalties imposed on all detected in such practices, the Fair was pre-eminently a place where
nobody’s virtue was over nice,
and all the ‘tricks of the trade’ flourished in a congenial soil. Thus Harvey, prentice to Symme atte Stile, who tells us in Langland’s “Piers Ploughman,” how
at Wye and Wynchestre I went to the faire,
lifts up some part of the veil for us, telling us that
wikkedlych to weye (wickedly to weigh)
was his first lesson.
We have already spoken of the Bishop’s Court or Pavilionis Aula. Here the Bailiffs and Justiciaries of the Fair met, not merely to make regulations, but to dispense justice, for the Pavilionis Aula was also a court of summary jurisdiction, a ‘piepowder court,’ cour des pieds poudreux or dusty-foot justice, that is, where the wily Autolycus, or Artful Dodger of the day, or other picker up of unconsidered trifles, was awarded short shrift and well-earned punishment either in stocks or pillory, or in the Bishop’s dungeon under Wolvesey Palace.